Archiving Links

The world is quiet here.

vfdir is an in progress, local-first, social bookmarking app in the spirit of are.na, Obsidian, and Unix systems. That’s a pretty dense statement and I promise to come back and unpack it later. But for those already in the know, today I want to talk through my thoughts on handling links.

The challenges to doing this correctly come from the original description. Local-first and unix means the app should not “own” the data. It should be available to users and other apps (to whatever extent the actual Operating System allows interoperability). On the web a link is a short string inside the href property of an a tag. To save a link usually means some database entry or line of json with the href, page title, favicon, and a preview. But when you look at how people use links you notice that like most other file formatslinks make bad categories. Links are pointers. They can lead to blog posts, headings within blog posts, mp3 files, Spotify playlists, collaborative documents with write access, x, y coordinates in a Figma file, and many more things. Links are fragile. The blog post might change, files can be deleted, the site could be taken down, and access could be revoked. To represent the link as a local file is well documented per OS, at least on Windows, macOS, and Linux. But after considering all these other factors that should almost be a last resort. In most other cases, there will be a preferable format to represent the data on the other end of that link.

more specifically, how does vfdir represent links while claiming to be an overlay to your local filesystem.